A spokesman for Attorney General Martha Coakley said caller ID spoofing is hard to prosecute because the perpetrator is often from another state or country. The Federal Trade Commission has stated that no changes to its Telemarketing Sales Rule would prevent the practice.

Could not Congress enact legislation making explicitly legal the use of deadly force against telemarketrs who engage in such behaviour?

I get calls looking for a Baptist church all the time. In college I would fark with the people but I have toned it down. I tried to get my number removed from the website where I am mistakenly listed but the guy who runs the site had a stroke or something.

I got the "Cardmember Services" one recently (again) and they not only came over Caller ID as "Bank of America" but had indeed spoofed one of their legit numbers.

I tried alerting BofA, and it was a nightmare. If you don't have an account with them, they don't give a fark. Even though you are trying to help them. By the time I got to the final person who gave me a fraud report email address (took 45 minutes), I told her if this is the way they behave then they deserve to be hacked and victims of fraud.

Diogenes:Whatchoo Talkinbout: EyeballKid: No, but maybe I'm weird in not being vindictive and petty enough to be an asshole to somebody whose only available employment opportunity is in telemarketing.

You're no fun.

He's also not truthful. Or trolling. I'll accept the latter.

None of the above.

*sigh*

I'm EyeballKid, and I'm...a former telemarketer. For 3 or 4 months in 1999, I sold replacement insulated windows for a guy who used the name brand windows for demonstrations only and would then install the generic knockoff versions. I quit after working Martin Luther King Day when one of the people I had to call was named...James E. Ray. Looking for any reason to quit, I saw it as my convenient omen.

Trust me, anybody who's a telemarketer feels, at least for a small period of time, that they have to be a telemarketer to make due.

Sorry, return to your Orbitz soda and slap bracelets while discussing how sticking it to those telemarketers is SO FUNNY!

I havent received a call from a telemarketer in years. Who do you guys give your number to?

Diogenes:I got the "Cardmember Services" one recently (again) and they not only came over Caller ID as "Bank of America" but had indeed spoofed one of their legit numbers.

I tried alerting BofA, and it was a nightmare. If you don't have an account with them, they don't give a fark. Even though you are trying to help them. By the time I got to the final person who gave me a fraud report email address (took 45 minutes), I told her if this is the way they behave then they deserve to be hacked and victims of fraud.

This is easily, if expensively fixed. There are 2 Caller ID meta fields. One is customizable by the user and the one being presented. Also the one that shows "caller unknown" if you choose to block your Caller ID number. The other cannot be customized and is used by the telco for routing calls and billing. Force the telcos to screen for telemarketers and override customized Caller ID.

EyeballKid:Diogenes: Whatchoo Talkinbout: EyeballKid: No, but maybe I'm weird in not being vindictive and petty enough to be an asshole to somebody whose only available employment opportunity is in telemarketing.

You're no fun.

He's also not truthful. Or trolling. I'll accept the latter.

None of the above.

*sigh*

I'm EyeballKid, and I'm...a former telemarketer. For 3 or 4 months in 1999, I sold replacement insulated windows for a guy who used the name brand windows for demonstrations only and would then install the generic knockoff versions. I quit after working Martin Luther King Day when one of the people I had to call was named...James E. Ray. Looking for any reason to quit, I saw it as my convenient omen.

Trust me, anybody who's a telemarketer feels, at least for a small period of time, that they have to be a telemarketer to make due.

Sorry, return to your Orbitz soda and slap bracelets while discussing how sticking it to those telemarketers is SO FUNNY!

Hey calling it your job ol' EyeballKid sure don't make it rightBut if you want me to I'll say a prayer for your soul tonight.

HenryFnord:This is easily, if expensively fixed. There are 2 Caller ID meta fields. One is customizable by the user and the one being presented. Also the one that shows "caller unknown" if you choose to block your Caller ID number. The other cannot be customized and is used by the telco for routing calls and billing. Force the telcos to screen for telemarketers and override eliminatecustomized Caller ID.

HenryFnord:This is easily, if expensively fixed. There are 2 Caller ID meta fields. One is customizable by the user and the one being presented. Also the one that shows "caller unknown" if you choose to block your Caller ID number. The other cannot be customized and is used by the telco for routing calls and billing. Force the telcos to screen for telemarketers and override customized Caller ID.

Fark threads are often like a train wreck or car crash - you can't look away, but you get nothing useful out of them. However, nuggets like this keep me coming back. While there are legitimate reasons to mask caller ID (battered family shelters), THIS^^ needs to be looked at.

grumpyoldmann:If it weren't for telemarketers, I wouldn't have anyone to talk to.

Yorue trying to be funny but there are a lot of old people out there that think that. I used to do sales auditing and would have to call the customer back to confirm their order and make sure all the info we had was correct. There was always an older person in the group of customers I would end up being on the phone with for a long time because they wanted to tell me about their grandchildren or something. I would entertain them for awhile because I knew I was probably the only person they had spoken to that day. I also called someone who, thought I was her doctor calling her back because she was having some medical trouble because she had run out of her meds and was having some issues. I kept her on the line and got on another phone and called 911 for her and stayed on the phone with her until help got there. That was scary but she ended up being OK

Tyrosine:EyeballKid: No, but maybe I'm weird in not being vindictive and petty enough to be an asshole to somebody whose only available employment opportunity is in telemarketing.

They should try prostitution. It's more dignified.

I knew a girl working as a telemarketer who was seriously considering that option. She thought it would be less trying on her soul. Thankfully she was able to take the half-step up the social ladder to retail.

My parents number was similar enough to an airport taxi service on Cape Cod. We changed the message to explicitly state it wasn't the taxi company and tons of people still would leave irate messages (apparently they must suck at taxi stuff)

I can't even imagine the amount of shiat this guy is getting on his phone now

odinsposse:Tyrosine: EyeballKid: No, but maybe I'm weird in not being vindictive and petty enough to be an asshole to somebody whose only available employment opportunity is in telemarketing.

They should try prostitution. It's more dignified.

I knew a girl working as a telemarketer who was seriously considering that option. She thought it would be less trying on her soul. Thankfully she was able to take the half-step up the social ladder to retail.

EyeballKid:Trust me, anybody who's a telemarketer feels, at least for a small period of time, that they have to be a telemarketer to make due.

Well, maybe, but if you're itchin' to call someone a vindictive and petty asshole, as you did in your initial comment, you may want to read the article and see if you can find someone more deserving of it than the guy who received the telemarketing call.

Funny I should see this headline. Lately I've been getting telemarketing calls and instead of just telling them to get cancer and die, I've tried a new strategy - keeping them on the phone as long as possible in the hopes that by wasting their time they'll cross me off their list.

So yesterday I got a call about loan modification, I told the guy, sure, tell me all about it. He says he'll have to call me back. I told him no, tell me now or don't call ag- too late, he hung up. Calls me back a few minutes later. I chewed him out for hanging up on me. He hangs up again. Then I noticed that the number he just used to call me was different, so I tried calling it back - and he picked up! It was a legit number. I berated him for hanging up on me, and I yelled at him some more.

But now I think I have his number. Now if I can find the last working payphone, I could have some fun. It's a California area code, so I'm thinking the best time to call is early in the morning here on the east coast.

Dimensio:A spokesman for Attorney General Martha Coakley said caller ID spoofing is hard to prosecute because the perpetrator is often from another state or country. The Federal Trade Commission has stated that no changes to its Telemarketing Sales Rule would prevent the practice.

Could not Congress enact legislation making explicitly legal the use of deadly force against telemarketrs who engage in such behaviour?

idesofmarch: Funny I should see this headline. Lately I've been getting telemarketing calls and instead of just telling them to get cancer and die, I've tried a new strategy - keeping them on the phone as long as possible in the hopes that by wasting their time they'll cross me off their list.

So yesterday I got a call about loan modification, I told the guy, sure, tell me all about it. He says he'll have to call me back. I told him no, tell me now or don't call ag- too late, he hung up. Calls me back a few minutes later. I chewed him out for hanging up on me. He hangs up again. Then I noticed that the number he just used to call me was different, so I tried calling it back - and he picked up! It was a legit number. I berated him for hanging up on me, and I yelled at him some more.

I did the "I'm really interested in this, tell me more" thing to a call once and they hung up on me, then called back and were rude, so I blocked their number.After I blocked their number I continued to get calls from them because they spoofed the Caller ID to put a +011 in front of the number and AT&T has no provision on their web thing for UVERSE voice to block something like that.When I called AT&T they were genuinely flummoxed about what to do about this.But they figured it out and somehow manually put in the block.

Back to the guy getting 500 calls a day, if he has an iPhone, I'm pretty sure you can select the number in the list and choose "block caller".This is why I use a Google Voice number for my business. AT&T will only allow me to block up to 20 numbers, Google Voice is basically unlimited.

I've done this. The company is called Progressive Bussiness Solutions. They actually sent bills to not one but two companies that I worked for asking for payment for magazines that we neither ordered or received. The funniest one was when the woman who claimed to be claling from a collection agency called on morning and after a breif back and forth about whether money was owed I asked her who had placed the order and she says, "DROxINxTHExWIND placed the order. Our representative has spoken to him several times and he confirmed receipt of the subscriptions." I calmy responded, "Sweetie, I'M DRO." She hung up on me. I Googled the company name and found a few consumer websites where people were complaining about having been duped by the company. One of the posts was from a disgruntled former employee of Progressive. He says that he was recruited out of a mall food court. They made all of these promises of high wages and opportunity for growth with the company. But, when he got to the office, it was a rundown building where he sat in a windowless room making the collection calls. He posted the phone numbers of his supervisors to the meesage board and told everyone who had been duped to call them directly. The guy who answered the phone tried to sound professional but you could tell he was clearly sitting at home somewhere on a cell. I called him a few dozen times over the span of a couple of weeks giving him shiat for being a lying scam artist. At first, he would passionately defend the company, telling me that I didn;t know what I was talking about. By the end of the two weeks he was losing it. Cursing me at the top of his voice. Once it even sounded like he threw his phone. Lol. I still have his number in my roledex in case I ever got another one of thise calls. But, when I just Googled them, I see that it appears their scam is up. At least, under that name.

EyeballKid:No, but maybe I'm weird in not being vindictive and petty enough to be an asshole to somebody whose only available employment opportunity is in telemarketing.

The problem here is a case of wrong identity, not of being a telemarketer.

Telemarketers know they are being offensive, I have no problems with someone being offensive back to them. Being off target is another matter, though.

HenryFnord:This is easily, if expensively fixed. There are 2 Caller ID meta fields. One is customizable by the user and the one being presented. Also the one that shows "caller unknown" if you choose to block your Caller ID number. The other cannot be customized and is used by the telco for routing calls and billing. Force the telcos to screen for telemarketers and override customized Caller ID.

They won't be able to identify all the telemarketers. What I think they need to do is have a * type number that you can call that says the last call was a do-not-call violation. The FTC gets a report with the real number rather than the spoofed one.

EyeballKid:I'm EyeballKid, and I'm...a former telemarketer. For 3 or 4 months in 1999, I sold replacement insulated windows for a guy who used the name brand windows for demonstrations only and would then install the generic knockoff versions. I quit after working Martin Luther King Day when one of the people I had to call was named...James E. Ray. Looking for any reason to quit, I saw it as my convenient omen.

HenryFnord:This is easily, if expensively fixed. There are 2 Caller ID meta fields. One is customizable by the user and the one being presented. Also the one that shows "caller unknown" if you choose to block your Caller ID number. The other cannot be customized and is used by the telco for routing calls and billing. Force the telcos to screen for telemarketers and override customized Caller ID.

That's not even expensive - simply stop using customized Caller ID except in very rare instances (e.g. shelters, witness protection, etc.), and just use the routing field for all IDs.

So why haven't they done it? Because the phone companies get paid by people using customized IDs, and they get paid for all those phone calls from telemarketers. They have a financial incentive to keep telemarketers in business.

idesofmarch:Funny I should see this headline. Lately I've been getting telemarketing calls and instead of just telling them to get cancer and die, I've tried a new strategy - keeping them on the phone as long as possible in the hopes that by wasting their time they'll cross me off their list.

So yesterday I got a call about loan modification, I told the guy, sure, tell me all about it. He says he'll have to call me back. I told him no, tell me now or don't call ag- too late, he hung up. Calls me back a few minutes later. I chewed him out for hanging up on me. He hangs up again. Then I noticed that the number he just used to call me was different, so I tried calling it back - and he picked up! It was a legit number. I berated him for hanging up on me, and I yelled at him some more.

But now I think I have his number. Now if I can find the last working payphone, I could have some fun. It's a California area code, so I'm thinking the best time to call is early in the morning here on the east coast.

I was a telemarketer for a few months in 2002. To be totally honest though, I never felt all that bad about it, although I suspect my situation was not the norm for the industry. It was a regular 9-5 and if you were good at it, which I was, the money was pretty respectable for a 20 year old kid. I liked my co-workers for the most part, and we had great ongoing nerf wars across the call center.

I never felt bad about calling people for a couple of reasons. One, we only called people in our time zone, and I only worked 9 to 5. Two, it wasn't a scam, and for a lot of people was actually a pretty good deal. I mean, the business as a whole might have been, but not my part of it.

I sold cheap vacation packages in exchange for the opportunity to be sold on a condo time share. The package I sold was $150 (I think I was allowed to go down to $100), and for that you were given 2 (I think, might have been 3) nights in a nice family friendly type resort (and a discounted rate I you wanted to add nights) and about $200 in gift cards to restaurants/gas station/golf/whatever. All you had to do was attend a probably high pressure sales thing that was guaranteed to last under 90 minutes.

And that's how I sold it. I usually just went off script and told people to go on a cheap/free (if you use the gift cards) beach vacation for the price of 90 minutes of saying no to some pushy salesman. Maybe people appreciated the honesty, but I did well.

It's pretty much a given that if you get a call from one of these scumbags ("account services", Med-Alert scammers, Free diabetes monitor, Auto Warranty, etc) the number on the caller ID is 100% guaranteed to be fake, so simply calling back to give them hell won't work.

So instead, I just keep them on the line as long as possible. Listen to the pitch, ask questions, ask them to repeat themselves, speed-tap the mute button while talking, etc. If at all possible, I kept one guy on the phone for almost 40 minutes. Sometimes I try to get a number where I can call them back, but this is dicey - it's an automatic hangup about 75% of the time.

Their whole business model relies on the fact that they typically get a certain positive response rate (I have no idea what that is, but in direct mail marketing, 2% is considered very good). Since their payoff is based on churning through the losing calls as fast as possible to get to the "winners", simply having every single losing call take 3 minutes instead of 3 seconds would shut most of them down.

I knew a girl working as a telemarketer who was seriously considering that option. She thought it would be less trying on her soul. Thankfully she was able to take the half-step up the social ladder to retail.

Theaetetus:That's not even expensive - simply stop using customized Caller ID except in very rare instances (e.g. shelters, witness protection, etc.), and just use the routing field for all IDs.

So why haven't they done it? Because the phone companies get paid by people using customized IDs, and they get paid for all those phone calls from telemarketers. They have a financial incentive to keep telemarketers in business.

That's exactly right. Oh, reminds me, anybody ever heard of phone bill cramming? This is another one that's pretty terrible. Basically, the scammer puts up a website that collects phone numbers for a chance for a free iPad or whatever, and hidden in the fine print, you're signing up for their newsletter and they'll charge you $0.30 a month for it. They tell the phone company that you're a customer and the phone company adds on the third-party billing to your phone bill, then forwards your payment on to the scammer. You don't notice a separate invoice, because it shows up on your phone bill. You call the phone company and biatch about it, they tell you that you have to talk to "IP Connection" or whoever is showing up as the third party biller. Meanwhile, thousands of people are funneling $0.30/mo to these jackasses, all because the jackasses have an in with the phone company.

Loren:EyeballKid: No, but maybe I'm weird in not being vindictive and petty enough to be an asshole to somebody whose only available employment opportunity is in telemarketing.

The problem here is a case of wrong identity, not of being a telemarketer.

Telemarketers know they are being offensive, I have no problems with someone being offensive back to them. Being off target is another matter, though.

HenryFnord: This is easily, if expensively fixed. There are 2 Caller ID meta fields. One is customizable by the user and the one being presented. Also the one that shows "caller unknown" if you choose to block your Caller ID number. The other cannot be customized and is used by the telco for routing calls and billing. Force the telcos to screen for telemarketers and override customized Caller ID.

They won't be able to identify all the telemarketers. What I think they need to do is have a * type number that you can call that says the last call was a do-not-call violation. The FTC gets a report with the real number rather than the spoofed one.

EyeballKid: I'm EyeballKid, and I'm...a former telemarketer. For 3 or 4 months in 1999, I sold replacement insulated windows for a guy who used the name brand windows for demonstrations only and would then install the generic knockoff versions. I quit after working Martin Luther King Day when one of the people I had to call was named...James E. Ray. Looking for any reason to quit, I saw it as my convenient omen.

You should have been in jail.

Having a "*" code to report the previous call as a Do Not Call violation and a second code for Phishing. Brilliant!

It's not their fault the only work going is close to minimum wage and involves pestering people to sell them crappy goods and services, hound them for donations, and sell them crappy politicians and parties.

They are victims of marketing and advertising, fraud and misleading propaganda just as much as you are.

Governments are complicit in this BS-mongering. They welcome call centres to economic devastated areas and crow about the jobs made. No wonder people are fleeing the call centre states and provinces. Even people in India and other English-speaking low wage countries would sooner do something else.

Call centres are little better than sweat shops, but in sweat shops you are making things everybody, even the poor, buy and needs, like shoes or t-shirts, or flip-flops or leather sandals.

You should be polite and firm to nuisance callers. A quick hang-up saves everybody waste time on these transactions. Personally I do not answer my telephone unless I hear a welcome voice on the answering machine. Yes, I screen calls from my parents. If I didn't I would spend hours of precious time trying to say "no way, José" politely.

Like drugs, tobacco, firearms and other nuisances, politicians make too much hay and too much lettuce out of fraudsters and shills for them to shut down the telemarketeers. Everytime you speak to a telemarketeer selling something crooked or stupid, call your Congresscritter and see if that helps! They are there to serve you but often serve only themselves or their real masters, the big corporate or rich individual donors.